Sugar Mama (Alenu Entertainment, MarVista Entertainment, Tubi, Lifetime, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After last night’s (Sunday, September 7) MTV Video Music Awards lumbered to a close, I switched to Lifetime for one of their all-time worst movies: Sugar Mama, a 2025 “race movie” (i.e, one in which all the principal characters are Black) produced by Alenu Entertainment and our old friends at MarVista Entertainment and directed by Bobby Yan (a man, by the way) from a particularly demented script by Briana Cole. To say it promised a lot more than it delivered would be an understatement. It was built around a dating app that matched hot, studly young men with older well-to-do women seeking what in the 1920’s and 1930’s were called gigolos: paid companions whose services might or might not include sex. In this case the young man is drop-dead-gorgeous Mike Sheppard (Jibre Hordges), who at the start of the episode is just getting the kiss-off from his latest keeper because he’s been spending too much time away from her with his age-peer girlfriend, Gia Smith (Liyah Chante Thompson). Because he and Gia are both in college and he’s also developing an app of his own – a health-related one that inputs people’s blood types and medical histories and generates personalized recommendations for preventive care – Mike needs a new sugar mama pronto. He finds her in Veronica King (Latarsha Rose), a legendary name in the high-tech world, a middle-aged but still attractive Black woman who’s made a fortune in the computer world and lives with an age-peer companion, a Black doctor named Greg (Joseph Curtis Callender) whom she insists she’s not intimate with but they’re merely “best friends.” Veronica invites Mike to spend the night in her home but when he tries to kiss her, she angrily slaps him.

It turns out her interest in him is not sexual but maternal: she envisions him as a replacement for her long-lost son Jayson, whom she says is doing a round-the-world tour. The moment she says that, we start suspecting that Jayson either died or, à la Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, never existed at all. Veronica had a husband named Richie (Rabon Hutcherson) who died in a mysterious car accident. Ria is approached by another young Black woman, Nora Washington (Raquel Davies), who tells her she needs to get Mike away from Veronica as soon as possible. She explains that her older sister Carla once worked for Richie King and started an affair with him, but as soon as Veronica found out she sabotaged their car and killed them in a way that looked like an accident. Alas, then both Nora and Ria herself are beaten nearly to death by an unseen assailant. Veronica also gives Mike a knockout drug on the day he’s supposed to go see Ria in the hospital – though the skyline of a big city (probably Seattle or Portland, since we get the impression this takes place in the Pacific Northwest) looms in the background, we get the impression the setting is a small town because there seems to be only one hospital and Greg works there as a doctor – and when he comes to he’s chained to the wall of Veronica’s basement. Veronica keeps trying to infantilize him, offering to feed him, calling him “Mikey,” and ultimately referring to him as “Jayson” so we think she’s enlisting him as a living replacement for her dead or never-extant son.

The truth is a lot more sinister [spoiler alert!]: the night Richie and Carla had their “accident,” caused by Veronica severing their brake fluid line so their car couldn’t stop on a winding mountain road, Jayson was also in the car in the back seat. The accident killed Richie, though Veronica came along and finished the job on Carla personally, strangling her. As for Jayson, he actually survived but was left in a persistent vegetative state (misspelled “vegitative” on the hospital report), and Veronica hid him in her basement, installed a fully functional set of hospital equipment, and entrusted Greg with his care. She’s been waiting all along for a young man Jayson’s age with the rare O-negative blood type Jayson had so she could kill him and have Greg transplant his heart into Jayson – and Mike was her pigeon. After Ria had glimmers of the truth, Veronica sneaked into her hospital room during visiting hours and injected her with poison so she died. Mike’s former sugar mama and Nora were also killed, so when Mike finally realizes the truth, Greg is the only person there for him to confide him – only he doesn’t know that Greg not only has been in on the whole plot with Veronica but she’s counting on his medical skills to transplant Mike’s heart into Jayson’s body. Just when we think someone out there is going to cotton to the whole scheme and rescue Mike in time to save his life, both he and we realize as Greg puts the anaesthetic hood over his face that no one is going to save him. He’s going to die so Veronica’s son Jayson (played as a boy in the car by Matthew Williams and as a young man by Pierre Jones) can live, and there’s a quirky final scene in which Jayson is up and around, though still walking with a cane, trying to get in touch with the normal world after he’s been in a coma for over a decade.

I can’t watch a mystery thriller in which the bad guys get away unscathed without thinking of Raymond Chandler’s adage that the criminal in a crime story must always be punished somehow, whether through “the operation of the law courts” (though Chandler became the exemplar of a certain kind of American tough-guy language, he’d been educated largely in England and therefore sometimes lapsed into British English usages like “law courts”) or not. “It has nothing to do with morality,” Chandler explained; “it’s the logic of the form.” If the criminal isn’t punished, he wrote, “it leaves a feeling of irritation.” Briana Cole’s nihilistic ending for Sugar Mama certainly irritated me, though it also suggested that this was one more story that ended just when it was getting interesting. One could readily imagine a sequel showing young Jayson King slowly becoming aware of the world and ultimately realizing just how much blood his mother has on her hands and how many lives she took winning him his second chance at life – not that I’m asking Cole and Bobby Yan to concoct a sequel to this perfectly dreadful movie!